Via TPM, this from the Online WSJ:

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA’s own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge’s approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called “black programs” whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

What could go wrong?

Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item — and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net.

The critical point here is that this “gradually” wider net in fact grows exponentially, as we wrote a over year ago. It’s the old “six degrees of separation idea”—10 friends of 10 friends of 10 friends of 10 friends… rapidly grows into a very, very large number.

An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city — for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans — the government’s spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.

It’s almost like Garbage In, Garbage Out, isn’t it? Suppose Bush needs a terrorist plot in time for an election, or just to get a bump in the polls. He has somebody tortured (and distributes the videos to the 24 fans in the Village, so they know the problem is Serious). The torturee gives up a name (say “Hussein”) and a city: Detroit. And all the email, all the phone records, all the financial records for a whole fucking city get sucked up and stored in the NSA’s database. Except it’s all garbage because, as we know, torture isn’t about getting the truth, but about extracting a confession.

But not. Garbage In, perhaps. But Gold Out:

The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.

The information doesn’t generally [Generally?!??!?] include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone’s location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message.

Pure gold. Imagine what you could do with that, if you were power hungry, or dishonest, unlike, of course, all the fine professionals in the Bush administration. Ratfucking would be the least of it.

Oh, and yes. They really are sucking everything up. Remember Mark Kleiman:

NSA gets access to the flow of data from telecommunications switches through the FBI, according to current and former officials. It also has a partnership with FBI’s Digital Collection system, providing access to Internet providers and other companies. The existence of a shadow hub to copy information about AT&T Corp. telecommunications in San Francisco is alleged in a lawsuit against AT&T filed by the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, based on documents provided by a former AT&T official. In that lawsuit, a former technology adviser to the Federal Communications Commission says in a sworn declaration that there could be 15 to 20 such operations around the country. Current and former intelligence officials confirmed a domestic network of hubs, but didn’t know the number. “As a matter of policy and law, we can not discuss matters that are classified,” said FBI spokesman John Miller.

For your reference, I include the dead letter of the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It’s plain to any sane person—that is, anyone outside the Village—that if the Framers were writing the Constitution today, they would consider Email—the address, the subject line, and the content—as “papers.”

The people running this program are power-mad lunatics, and the elected officials who enabled it are traitors to the Constitution. There’s just no other way to frame it. These surveillance tools are weapons to be used in time of war. And they’ve been turned against the American people. Harry, Nancy, well done. Hillary, Obama: Your move.